A novel chaotic spiking neuron and its paralleled spike encoding function

Inspired by sound encoding mechanisms of the spiral ganglion cell in the mammalian inner ear, in this paper we present a novel chaotic spiking neuron and analyze its encoding function. A set of N neurons accepts a common analog input and outputs a set of N chaotic spike-trains. We give some theorems which guarantee that the set of neurons can encode various inputs (which can be constant, periodic, non-periodic or random) into a summation of their spike-trains in such a way that a spike density of the summed spike-train mimics a waveform of the input. We also confirm the encoding function of an electrical circuit model of the neuron by a SPICE simulation.